TMcG

The NYRSF event on Tuesday night was a pleasure: wonderful audience, wonderful reading by vschanoes from a devilishly funny and brutally painful novella, wonderful group to schmooze with, and a wonderful meal afterward at Milady's. Also an enjoyable round of drinks beforehand in the beautifully candlelit darkness of The Room, a little bar all brick and iron and stone and heavy wood—the perfect venue to set the mood for "Taibhse," the story I read, and just a few doors up from the SGDA.

Curator and host Jim Freund recorded the readings in both audio and video format; the story is in text format at my very Web 1.0 site The Vale of Broken Links; and I posted a couple of pictures on my website. (Podium is weirdly tall? Or five-foot-four is shorter than it used to be?)

The Times's "Which Language Rules to Flout. Or Flaunt?" and John Crowley in reply.

In the Pet Peeve Department:

If you use ellipsis points at the end of some dialogue to indicate faltering or trailing-off speech, you do not then have to announce in the narration that the utterance has "trailed off." It's evident from the punctuation.

If you use an em-dash at the end of some dialogue to indicate sharply cut-off speech, and the next line is another line of dialogue, you do not have to announce at any point that the second speaker has cut the first speaker off. The two lines of dialogue and their punctuation work aurally, just as in a playscript, and the reader doesn't need any help from the narrator to get what's happening.

( For example... )

A lot of the time, "said" tags are unnecessary; we know who's speaking from context, from interpolated description ["Okay." His pained expression belied the assent. "Yes"], and from the content, syntax, and vocabulary of the dialogue itself. But "said" tags do serve a rhythmic purpose and help keep the reader oriented, and as long as they aren't awkward or excessive they're close to invisible, hardly registering on the reader's conscious mind, as integrated as punctuation. "He trailed off" and "he said, trailing off" and "She cut him off" and "she said, cutting him off" make the "said"s visible to no good purpose. When they appear frequently throughout a piece of fiction, they amount to a rhythmic crutch; to me they loom larger each time, and become annoying narrative tics. It's like the TV commercial where the guy's in the job interview talking about his qualifications and what the interviewer sees and hears is this droning guy in the background and the stain on his shirt SHOUTING IN CREEPY GIBBERISH!!!! He can't focus on what the guy's saying, because the stain distracts him so much.

It took me this long to get double-As for my camera and get a shot of this that looks more like the physical cover than the Amazon image does (it's quite a lovely, classy cover, so it deserves it), but at last I can say, "Look what showed up on my porch!"





It's the German-language edition of The Binder's Road, the sequel to Zauberin des Lichts, and I wasn't twmed this time; German Amazon dropped the weird Cassiopeian middle initial from my byline for this book. And it makes a lovely set with this one.

I've been a freelance book copyeditor since 1987, when I started copyediting for Zebra and Pinnacle Books, and I've specialized in science fiction and fantasy since 1989, when I started copyediting for Del Rey. For fifteen of those years I worked in Editorial at The New Yorker, the last six of them as a Page O.K.'er (senior copyeditor/closing editor). I've been a full-time freelancer since April, 2000.

Houses I've freelanced for include DAW, Bantam, Del Rey, Tor/Forge, St. Martin's Press, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Baen, Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Phobos, Meisha Merlin, Pyr, and Putnam.

Genre authors whose work I've copyedited include Alan Dean Foster, Andre Norton, Angus Wells, Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Anne McCaffrey, Ben Bova, Brandon Sanderson, Bruce Sterling, C. J. Cherryh, Charles de Lint, Charles L. Grant, Charles Sheffield, Christopher Pike, Christopher Rowley, Dave Duncan, David and Leigh Eddings, David Drake, David Farland, David Weber, Dean Wesley Smith, Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, Diane Carey, Elizabeth Arnason, Elizabeth Haydon, Elizabeth Willey, Esther Friesner, Frederik Pohl, Gene Wolfe, Hal Duncan, Harry Harrison, Harry Turtledove, J. V. Jones, Jack Chalker, Jack McKinney, James Luceno, James P. Hogan, James White, Jane Lindskold, Jerry Oltion, John Barnes, John Ringo, Julian May, Juliet Marillier, Kate Elliott, Katherine Kurtz, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Kay Kenyon, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Larry Niven, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Mark L. Van Name, Melissa Scott, Mike Resnick, Norman Spinrad, Orson Scott Card, Paul Chafe, Peter V. Brett, Poul Anderson, R. A. Salvatore, Robert Jordan, Robert Sawyer, Robin Hobb, S. P. Somtow, Sarah Zettel, Sean McMullen, Shariann Lewitt, Stephen King, Steven Barnes, Steven Brust, Steven Gould, Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind, Tim Powers, Timothy Zahn, and Vernor Vinge.

I've also copyedited a large number of mainstream and literary titles, mysteries, suspense/thrillers, Westerns, romances, media tie-ins, and nonfiction works.

My articles about copyediting have appeared in the SFWA Bulletin and the Del Rey Books newsletter. A Writer's Guide to Understanding the Copyeditor is available to read online at the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America Website.

To inquire about availability and rates, please email Terry_McGarry AT sff DOT net.

Just got an email from Amazon telling me that they've shipped my test-preordered copy of the paperback edition of Triad. So...it's out!

Available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble online, as well as from Powell's, from my favorite place to buy books online, Books-a-Million, and from my favorite place to buy DVDs online, which has now expanded into bookselling and of the vendors listed here does in fact have the best price for this book, with no club-membership requirement: Deep Discount.

At I-Con I read from the chapter that mirrors the first chapter of Illumination from a nineteen-years-later perspective. It was received well, and reading it gave me a wonderful feeling of coming full circle while still moving forward.

I received this remembrance of Jim Baen in an email from Bob (Robert Stacy), and he was kind enough to give me permission to post it.

The one and only time I met Jim Baen was in 1974, when I was travelling
cross-country with Robert Borski. Bob's agent, Kirby McCauley, set up a meeting
for us with Jim when we were on the east coast, shortly before Worldcon in DC.

We were a couple of hippie reprobates who'd attended Clarion the year before.
Bob had placed a couple of stories in F&SF and Analog.

Jim's "office" was in the back of a room lined with shelves, full of gawd
knows what. He was friendly, he was gracious. He didn't know us from nobody,
and he treated us like peers. The details of our conversation are lost to me
now, but the salient impression he left me with was how important it was to him
to not only hold a door open for new writers, but to make them feel welcome, to
feel special, for wanting to pursue such a lunatic goal as publishing their
dreams. His willingness to foster newcomers was an inspiration.

I understand that Web is descriptive. But a hyphen in "off-line" and no hyphen in "online"? Makes sentences like "You can work either online or off-line" look silly.

Well, that was a pain.

It turns out that if you have the Web 11 (Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition) electronic version already installed on your machine, the current Web 3 (Merriam-Webster's Third New International Unabridged Dictionary) electronic version won't load correctly. You need to uninstall Web 11, install Web 3, then install Web 11 again.

I pretty much figured that when I ran into a problem, but I contacted tech support. ( here's our exchange, which solved the problem )

Maybe eventually they'll revise the FAQ, or maybe it's just not a Q that's F enough A. Or maybe they'd rather we all subscribe to the online versions of the dictionaries. But I can't always get online when I need access to Web 11 and/or Web 3, and I'd rather buy once than subscribe, so I am still thrilled that they offer these references on disk. And tech support got back to me within a day.

Triad has been released. Hooray!


I haven't scanned in the dust jacket yet; the title and byline colors are different from (and much more pretty than) the ones in that image, and I hope a scan will do it justice. The book looks really beautiful. The insides ain't bad either.

I are very pleased. :)